Acceptable Loss - Anne Perry [121]
Another hour of tedious questions and invented excuses, and by the time it was growing dark, Hester had found the house where Hattie had been for a few hours.
“Yeah,” the woman said grudgingly after Hester questioned her. She wiped her wet hands on her skirt. “Wot’s it ter you, then? This is a respectable ’ouse, an’ there ain’t no ’oring goes on ’ere. It were a right lady as brought ’er ’ere an’ said as she’d be stayin’ fer a few days.”
“But she didn’t stay for a few days, did she?” Hester pressed. “She was gone in a matter of hours.”
“So she changed ’er mind. She still were paid fer, so why should I care?”
“Who did she go with?” Hester felt her throat tight, her hands clammy.
“Said ’is name were Cardew. Didn’t see ’is face, but real nice-spoken, ’e were.”
Hester thanked her and turned to leave, stumbling against the doorpost but barely feeling the bruise to her hand.
“THAT DOESN’T MAKE SENSE,” Monk said gently as they sat in front of the fire late that evening, the clock nearing midnight. Hester was exhausted, and still cold in spite of the warmth of the room. “Why would Margaret help Rupert Cardew in anything?”
“I don’t know,” she said miserably. “Maybe he lied to her?” She knew as soon as she had said it that it didn’t make sense. She looked up and saw it in Monk’s eyes. “Maybe Hattie lied, and she didn’t steal the cravat at all. Perhaps Rupert paid her to say she did. Then she lost her nerve and wasn’t going to go through with it.”
“That explains why he would kill her, if he killed Parfitt in the first place,” he agreed. “But why would Margaret take her to the door? Wouldn’t Margaret want to keep her there, and have her take back her story?”
“Perhaps Hattie was afraid to do that. Maybe she just wanted to escape, and say nothing at all.”
Monk nodded slowly. “That’s possible. She couldn’t face you—or me—so she ran away. As far as defending Ballinger is concerned, her failure to appear comes to much the same result. Her first story would be disbelieved. So Margaret helps her, and then probably her sister Gwen. It sounds more like her than like Celia. Hattie goes to a house where she believes she’ll be safe. But Rupert finds her anyway. How?”
“Perhaps she’s been there before.” Hester buried her head in her hands. “William, what have we done?”
CHAPTER
12
RATHBONE RODE HOME IN a hansom sometime after Margaret had left the courtroom with her mother. It had been another good day. When Winchester had first presented his case, Rathbone had feared that there would be no effective defense. Now he was more than hopeful; he knew there was a real and very considerable likelihood that the jury would have a reasonable doubt as to Ballinger’s guilt.
Although, the irony of it was that the picture that emerged of Parfitt was so repellent that the jury would be reluctant to hang the man who had killed him. In fact, Rathbone judged that several of them would want to shake the killer’s hand and turn a blind eye to the law.
And there was a level at which this entire trial was not so much about who had killed Parfitt, quickly and more mercifully than he deserved, but about who had staked him, used him, and reaped the lion’s share of his profit. Rathbone had seen the anger in Monk’s face that drove him to pursue the deeper levels of the affair, and the guilt that his instinct had been too powerful to simply abandon the murder case in the beginning. There must have been moments when he would gladly have marked it “unsolved” and shelved it.
Now Monk was going to fail anyway, because no one would hang for the crime—either the lesser crime of strangling Parfitt or the greater crime of having created his opportunity in the first place, and then fed him with money and skill until he became a monster.
He understood Monk and wished that his failure were avoidable, particularly that Rathbone himself did not have to be such a powerful instrument in bringing it about. But he